If you take an interest in folk, blues and other traditional styles of guitar music, you may have encountered a puzzling phenomenon when you try to understand where the styles come from. You can trace them back easily enough to the pre-war years of the 1930s and maybe a little before. But all too often, as one delves back further into the past, the trail becomes harder to follow…
Part of the reason is that the deepest roots of modern music derive from folk song, which was passed down orally from mother to daughter, from father to son. During England’s industrial revolution, many of these centuries-old musical traditions died out, as people moved from field to factory and the pattern of their lives changed utterly. These sweeping changes might have meant extinction for some of England’s most beautiful and haunting folk-melodies – except for the fact that earlier English migrants to America took those songs with them. Like a plant uprooted from its native soil but replanted in fertile land far away, these songs survived and even flourished in the mountains of Kentucky and South Carolina.
Eventually, in the early 20th century, Cecil Sharp – an influential chronicler of folk music – learned about these surviving fragments of musical history and, aided by his indefatigable assistant Maud Karpeles, he ventured up into the trackless woods of the Appalachians and faithfully notated the songs people sang to him there. Now, more than a century later, folk guitarist Martin Simpson and producer Thomm Jutz have brought together a stellar line-up of English and American folk musicians to perform some of the poignant and powerful songs Sharp collected during his travels. We join Martin in his Sheffield home to find out more – and try some of his delectable collection of vintage and custom acoustic guitars…
What’s the? Where do the songs come from?
